I’m watching Old Orange, aka 45, as we’re all in this train plunging off this cliff together, and occupying myself by wondering, in a detached sort of way, how he’s going to handle this.

Not the crashing train of state, of course. It’s obvious what he’s doing about that. Nothing. Except for any grifting he and his Trumpists can accomplish before we find out where the bottom is.

I mean, how is he going to handle the fact that for apparently the very first time in his life he has to have evidence for what he says. And for the very first time, apparently, people think he shouldn’t be promising things unless he’s going to do them.

He’s spent his life throwing bizarre insults in order to play to his audience. He’s a Chatbot. What else would you expect? But suddenly when he says something idiotic for his base, such as that awful Obama wiretapping him, people start demanding evidence. What’s next? At this rate, they’ll soon be insisting on subject-verb agreement.

Then there’s the other big flap: the health care plan. It’s all the polar opposite of what he “promised.”

That’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the man. He’s never promised anything in his life, not in the usual meaning of the word. He says whatever he thinks might get you to sign on the dotted line, what he calls “The Deal,” and then after that he gets to do what he wants. “Come up and sue me some time” is his general idea.

And now, suddenly, the meddlesome proles are acting like he’s under some sort of obligation? To them? For having said something to get their votes? Crazy. He got their votes. They’re irrelevant now. You’d think that would be obvious even to proles.

So what’s he going to do when he has to answer for his words for the first time in his life?

But Bart Gellman, who has a very granular understanding of the modalities and rules tied to handling this kind of material, suggests an additional possibility: that Cohen-Watnick et al. had this material because they were using their privileged access to the nation’s top secrets to keep tabs on the FBI’s investigation of Trump and his top associates. …

Cohen-Watnick went to extraordinary, at least highly improper and likely illegal, steps to engage in political pushback on the President’s behalf. There is at least some circumstantial evidence that he was doing this to monitor or subvert the FBI’s investigation of the President and his top associates. Whether political pushback or obstruction, it is unlikely Cohen-Watnick would take such perilous steps on his own. Remember, Director of Intelligence Programs at the National Security Council. A simple review of the calendar makes it all but certain that Cohen-Watnick was up to this funny business at the same time Bannon and Kushner intervened to save his job – and, with that job, his almost unrivaled access to all US intelligence.

Would that a more moral Peter Thiel type would step in just that Robin Hood role.

Off to read the TPM article now. One thing that’s really rotting my socks right now is that in all of this, the media is trying to forget Hillary Clinton ever existed.

It takes some effort to remember/realize that she is the chief victim in all of this – to have worked so hard, to have run such a good campaign, to be so very suited to the job of President, and then to be robbed of what she’d earned by what the media is now treating as a breathless soap opera or spy thriller.

Yeah, the language issues are one of my pet peeves. The sexist ones, but also other usages that don’t pay attention to what words mean. (“Based off of” ?? Based on, dammit!) Or the way people throw “fuck” around like birdseed. It doesn’t mean “go get laid.” The way it’s used, it means “get raped” and it’s 100% misogynist. But nobody wants to even hear it because all the other swears sound prim by now and it’s essential to prove how very too-cool-for-school we all are.

And when it comes to meaning, Agent Orange is the son of a pimp. The family fortune started with running brothels.

You may or may not have caught a whiff of me taking a stand against sexist language on another “feminist” blog. It ended as it usually has throughout my adult life, with women piling on once I had, like one of my brothers said, become the nail that sticks up and gets hammered down.

You’re right, of course, but you did take out my one and only cuss word that I used freely on construction and other extremely sexist sites, like IT in Alaska, to make the boys blush (it does, it really really does when a woman uses it without apology). Unlike biological slurs, unlike religious slurs, which until this last last national selection, I had avoided, “fuck” insults the vast majority of human beings. Every one is capable of the act and most people are guilty of it, so great slur material.

Only, you are right. Like “sucks”* and “lame”, there are humans at the other end of the insult. “Fuck” is very much male subject to female object – even the famous bird is a hieroglyphic for balls and penis. There goes most my language in intense traffic.

*I’d asked one young male who used “sucks” as an insult “Is that what you say to your girlfriend when you’re begging her with tears in your eyes?” And of course, besides being what women do for men in icky women’s sex, it’s what gay men do for other men when abdicating their precious sovereign manhood and choosing to be objects, so twice the insult voltage.

If you'd like to read or comment on a synthesis of the ideas here, please check out my evolving work on government.
Pollution, privacy, abortion, net neutrality -- just about every controversy in modern life -- depends on correctly defining and understanding our inalienable rights.

Essential Information:

"What is the difference between a realist and a dreamer? The realist thinks that someday a UFO will come down and hover over the UN building, and that the aliens will come out of the UFO and offer to share their technology and solve all our world's problems.

The dreamer thinks maybe we can get our act together and do it ourselves."

Russian joke [It's a joke?] cited in William K. Hartmann, A Traveler's Guide to Mars.

Meta

Credits: Acid Test uses WordPress. Spam filtering and general junk defense by Akismet and Anti-leech. Rotating banner images php script from Dan Benjamin on A List Apart. Open source Piwik used to count site visits and their geographic location. (Google is getting too pervasive for my tastes.) No personal information of any kind is tracked or stored.